Advertisement for Carpenter's Chemical Wharehouse, 301 Market Street, PhiladelphiaFrontispiece from George Washington Carpenter, Essays on Some of the Most Important Articles of the Materia Medica, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: G. W. Carpenter, 1834)

Advertisement for Carpenter's Chemical Wharehouse, 301 Market Street, PhiladelphiaFrontispiece from George Washington Carpenter, Essays on Some of the Most Important Articles of the Materia Medica, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: G. W. Carpenter, 1834)

Artist/maker unknown, American

Geography: Made in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, North and Central America

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Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy from the William H. Helfand Collection

The advertisement showing the façade of Carpenter's Chemical Warehouse at Eighth and Market streets in Philadelphia appeared as the frontispiece to the second edition of a collection of essays by George Washington Carpenter, a druggist who also sold chemical and scientific apparatus. Not only are the names of many popular products listed on this print, but, rather surprisingly in an age of secret remedies, the contents of some of them are also revealed. The head of Aesculapius over the bow window represents a continuation of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British custom of using the busts of such famous figures from the history of medicine on apothecary shops, a useful device when homes and stores were not yet given street numbers and illiteracy was widespread. William H. Helfand, from The Picture of Health: Images of Medicine and Pharmacy from the William H. Helfand Collection (1991), p. 123.